Related papers: Against Pointillisme about Geometry
The continuum of real numbers has served well as a model for physical space in mechanics and field theories. However it is a well-motivated and popular idea that at the fundamental Planck scale the combination of gravitational and quantum…
The paper discusses some aspects of real physical space and time: structure of electrodynamics; structure of gravitational-inert theory in the real world; formation of the real matter; Mach's principle and the radiational cosmic mass;…
Contrary to our immediate and vivid sensation of past, present, and future as continually shifting non-relational modalities, time remains as tenseless and relational as space in all of the established theories of fundamental physics. Here…
The Einsteinian Theory of Gravitation ("General Theory of Relativity") is founded essentially; on the reception that the geometrical properties of the 4-dimensional space-time continuum are defined from the matter in it. Contrary to this,…
A new approach to the dynamics of the universe based on work by O Murchadha, Foster, Anderson and the author is presented. The only kinematics presupposed is the spatial geometry needed to define configuration spaces in purely relational…
In recent publications in physics and mathematics, concerns have been raised about the use of real numbers to describe quantities in physics, and in particular about the usual assumption that physical quantities are infinitely precise. In…
Poincar\'e held the view that geometry is a convention and cannot be tested experimentally. This position was apparently refuted by the general theory of relativity and the successful confirmation of its predictions; unfortunately,…
Modern physics, via the standard model with Higgs mechanism and string theory for example, has supplied ether-like models and emergent general relativity scenarios that substantially weaken the usual defense of orthodox relativity and…
The stipulation that no measurable quantity could have an infinite value is indispensable in physics. At the same time, in mathematics, the possibility of considering an infinite procedure as a whole is usually taken for granted. However,…
Why is the manifold topology in a spacetime taken for granted? Why do we prefer to use Riemann open balls as basic-open sets, while there also exists a Lorentz metric? Which topology is a best candidate for a spacetime; a topology…
In this contribution, we suggest the approach that geometric concepts ought to be defined in terms of physical operations involving quantum matter. In this way it is expected that some (presumably nocive) idealizations lying deep within the…
The theories of quantum mechanics and relativity dramatically altered our understanding of the universe ushering in the era of modern physics. Quantum theory deals with objects probabilistically at small scales, whereas relativity deals…
This article presents a novel interpretation of quantum mechanics. It extends the meaning of ``measurement'' to include all property-indicating facts. Intrinsically space is undifferentiated: there are no points on which a world of locally…
We consider five-dimensional real linear spaces with a (otherwise well-known) linear action of the Galilei and the Poincare group on them, describe the geometry of these two spaces, and show, that these geometries comprise the notions of…
Whether or not space-time is fundamentally discrete is of central importance for the development of the theory of quantum gravity. If the fundamental description of space-time is discrete, typically represented in terms of a graph or…
There is a venerable position in the philosophy of space and time that holds that the geometry of spacetime is conventional, provided one is willing to postulate a "universal force field". Here we ask a more focused question, inspired by…
.We expound an alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation of the formalism of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. The basic difference is that the new interpretation is formulated in the language of epistemological realism. The {\psi}…
Theories in physics usually do not address ``the present''or ``the now''. However, they usually have a precise notion of an ``instant'' (or state). I review how this notion appears in relational point mechanics and how it suffices to…
General relativity is applied to the strong interaction; the nexus between the two being arrived at by constructing a line element having the Yukawa form, which is used to describe geometrically the classical dynamics of a particle moving…
In this paper I propose a new principle in physics: the principle of "finiteness". It stems from the definition of physics as a science that deals (among other things) with measurable dimensional physical quantities. Since measurement…